Collections & Series

Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

I really can't tell how I feel about these book memes. In the book I just finished, Calvino talks about reading, and being a reader, from so many angles you grow dizzy. One of his points is that we readers all tend to have a great deal of (secret) pride in our libraries and in showing off our knowledge (or pretending we have it). I recognize that in myself and try to avoid it, not always with great success, and my nod to that is that I do try to collect only books that I've actually read and feel I might open again. But Calvino also points out that readers really are infatuated with reading and, like all lovers, want to share that infatuation. And what's wrong with that, really? False humility is just as much a flaw as pride. I am genuinely curious about what other people read, especially people whose lives and minds I get to experience vicariously through blogging, and it doesn't matter a bit to me whether the person is young or old or scholarly or not; I love reading about people's reading that is way, way different from mine. We may as well celebrate this thing that we share, since most of us have felt out-of-step with society forever, merely by virtue of the fact that we all probably knew the phrase "get your nose out of that book!" before we were six or seven.

I do wish someone (why not you, she asks herself) would come up with a more creative set of book-meme questions.

Comments

I wholeheartedly agree with your reflection on the nature of the book meme. The question I found the most difficult was identifying books that mean a lot to me. How can I exclude any of them? When I open their covers, the words run to greet me like old friends (a line borrowed from Garret Keiser's A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, used in reference to the BCP). How can I reject any of my old friends?

Consequently, I just wandered through my library, touching this volume, holding another, and taking a moment to recall the time and place when each one entered my life, then randomly picked a few.

Next time this goes around, I nominate Beth to initiate it, with a fresh set of questions.